Archives For Q and A

Is it Time to Quit your Day Job?

Jay Patel —  May 13, 2013

Punch Bowl Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (OR), USA

Should I quit my job and become a full-time photographer?

If you have ever asked yourself this question, you are not alone. Photography usually starts out as a hobby, but after a while, lots of passionate photographers start wondering if they could make it as full-time professionals. So, here are some questions to help you decide whether or not a full-time photography job is for you.

Are you good enough?

One of the first things you should do to a look at your portfolio. Are you good enough to a make a living doing this? That’s not an easy questions at answer, but it’s important. Facebook and other social networking sites make it easy to get lots of accolades. That’s great motivation and it makes you feel good – but positive comments from people who care about your feelings aren’t enough. They aren’t a true indication of your talent. Real critiques and evaluations are hard to come by on social media. Do you think your friends and family would feel comfortable telling you the truth – even if if meant they might risk damaging their relationship with you? And beyond that – are they qualified to know the difference between a good photograph and a mediocre one?

One way to find out if you have the necessary talent is to compare your work with other professional photographers in the field. Be honest with yourself. How does your work match up with theirs? You don’t have to be the best out there, but your work should be competitive enough to provide an attractive option to your customers.

Business or Pleasure?

Varina and I are both Wilderness and Landscape photographers. When other photographers look at our images, they are convinced that we have a dream job… and for all practical purposes we do. But, photographs alone don’t tell the whole story. The graphic below shows an estimate of our business needs – and the perception of others who think photography is all about traveling to exotic locations.

PowerPoint Presentation

In reality, taking photographs is a small part of our business. Other business activities dominate day-to-day activities. As a photographer, you will probably have to do these activities yourself… at least until you are making enough money to hire someone else to do them for you.

Just as in any other profession, there is often a difference between what you really like to do, and what you can get paid to do. You might hope to be a landscape photographer, only to find that you can’t make enough money unless you shoot weddings, senior portraits, or products as well. There are going to be some tough decisions as you make a transition into full-time photography, so prepared to face the facts of running a business.

Will it kill my passion?

So, let’s say you really are good enough to become a full time photographer – and you have the skills and patience required to run your own business. In that case, there’s one more thing you should consider. Will turning photography isn’t a money-making venture kill your passion for it? Aside from the physical work, being a full-time photographer may take an emotional toll as well. It will take time to establish yourself, and you might not be as successful as you’d hoped. It is very possible that selling prints, or filling workshops, or dealing with unruly wedding parties may make photography  feel like a chore. If you are struggling to keep a business running, will you be as excited about picking up your camera and heading outdoors when the weekend comes around? Or will you be relieved to put the camera down?

For Varina and I, photography is a dream job… but it sure as heck isn’t easy. We have successfully navigated the turbulent waters of growing our business, and we’ve settled into a fairly comfortable routine that works well for us. There are still days when photography feels more like a chore than a dream job, but we still grab our cameras and head out into the wilderness every chance we get.

Are you ready to let go of the security of your day job and take the plunge? Or have you done it already? We’d love to hear your stories and advice!

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Interview with TWIP – Episode #302

Jay Patel —  May 6, 2013

Punch Bowl Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (OR), USAhawaii_8981_4828

Recently we had pleasure to sit down with Frederick Van Johnson the host of This Week in Photo for a brief interview.  We talked about how we got started in photography, what defines our photographic style and what it takes to balance family life and photography. We love TWIP’s casual interview style and plan to appear on future episodes.

You can listen to the complete interview on TWIP at: http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/2013/twip-302/

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How Can I Simplify an Image?

Varina Patel —  April 25, 2013

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Simplifying an image can be difficult, but it starts with choosing a simple subject. Look for subjects that draw the eye and stands out from its surroundings. Don’t try to include the whole scene in the finished image – instead, choose a very simple composition that showcases just one area or object. Once you’ve identified your subject, look for distractions. It’s ok to have a secondary element in your shot… but avoid clutter.

Blinded by the Light - Varina Patel

I use lots of other techniques to simplify my images as well. If clashing colors are distracting – try converting to black and white. If dark shadows or bright highlights draw your attention away from the subject, use a diffuser to soften the light. Look for colors that are similar for a simplified color palette.

Trillium - Varina Patel

I like to use a long shutter speed to smooth the surface of a lake or pond to remove ripples on the surface. And sometimes I use a wide aperture to create a narrow depth of field that softens a distracting background.

The Quiet - Varina Patel

What techniques do you use to simplify a composition? Feel free to share examples and ideas in the comments!

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Q and A: Should I Major in Art in College?

Varina Patel —  March 21, 2013

High school students ask me if they should go to art school… with hope in their voices. Their parents ask me if I think art is a practical choice for a college major… with skepticism. And as a kid who dreamed of being a photographer – and a parent who knows that making it in the art business is tough… I’ll try to answer the question honestly.

This is something I’ve thought about quite a lot. I’m a professional photographer, and it’s a tough business. It’s incredibly competitive – and just having talent in art isn’t enough. I started out as an art student – studying photography and painting and drawing… and all the other requirements for a degree in the liberal arts. A student who graduated with a degree in art usually gets a basic education in math, science, and language as well. I don’t know of any schools that don’t require a well-rounded collection of classes. But in the end, I’m glad I decided to change my major.

I eventually earned a degree in information technology. I know – that seems like an odd choice for someone who was already building a photography business. But, it was definitely the right thing for me, rather than going through art school. See, the thing is, you don’t need a college education in order to learn to make great photographs – and there are so many ways to learn. Spending time working as a photography assistant, going on a workshop or two, shadowing a pro, and doing lots of research online… all of these are great ways to learn. But building a business? That’s an entirely different thing. If you want to be successful – to make money from your art, you need a different kind of knowledge.

The problem I’ve seen with students who finish college with a degree in art or photography, is that they feel lost once they are done with school. A business degree would help them start and run a business. A marketing degree would help them market their work. A degree in information technology (like mine) would let them build their own website, handle e-commerce, and understand the software they use for post-processing. A degree in language arts would help them write great articles so they can get published in magazines or write books. See where I’m going with this? Most art students know how to make art… but being a professional photographer is about SO much more than that.

And of course – there’s always the fact that photography is an extremely difficult world to break into. The odds of being able to make a living from it are small – so having a degree in something more “practical” is a great idea. But please don’t be discouraged! If you are determined and willing to work very hard, you can make it as a photographer. I know that’s true, because I did it myself. But remember – part of “making it” is being practical about the choices you make along the way.  The ones who succeed are the ones who understand that being a professional artist takes a lot more than just artistic talent.

If you do decide to major in art, make sure the school you’ll be attending has a well-rounded program. In addition to the classes you need for your major, look for classes that teach important skills like marketing, business, writing, computers, and so on. You might also want to consider a double major, or minor in art while concentrating your studies in another field. While you are in school, look for internships and find photographers who will let you shadow them while they work. Make connections with other photographers who know more than you do. Ask a million questions… and take note of how others are running their businesses, how they make money, how they market their work, and how they become successful. Watch for and learn from their mistakes, too… it’s always better to learn from other people’s mistakes than to make your own. ;)

For those of you who dream about being professional artists… you can do it if you are willing to work for it. ;) Good luck!

And for all of you – what advice can you offer to someone who wants to be a professional artist?

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Am I An Effective Landscape Photographer?

Jay Patel —  February 25, 2013

Tom McCall Nature Preserve, Oregon (OR), USA

So – you’ve got the brand new Canon 5D MKIII or the Nikon D800, and you’ve stocked up on the most expensive lenses money can buy. And maybe now you think you are all set to conquer the world of landscape photography. Right? Well… we’re guessing you know it’s not that easy. Buying the gear is the easy part. Now it’s time to head out into the field.

Some photographers spend hours reading every single review of the latest cameras. They study the MTF curves for each lens in their collection, and indulge in countless debates about the best gear for pursuing their landscape photography passion. But sometime they forget to consider something more important – what to photograph, and how to get a good shot.

I’m not talking about improving your technical or processing skills. No. This is about your effectiveness as a photographer in the field. Ask yourself – can I consistently capture effective images when I am on location?

Tom McCall Nature Preserve, Oregon (OR), USA

Pony Tail Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (OR), USA

During interviews, we are often asked, “How much time do you spend on location?” To answer this question, let’s take a look at a typical year for us. We traveled to Florida, California, Utah, Oregon, Nicaragua, Denver, and Hawaii. For an example of a typical photography trip, consider our trip to Oregon. We spent 3 full days hiking, exploring, and shooting in the Columbia River Gorge and the surrounding area. To date, I have processed 14 unique images (photos with completely different compositions) that will make it to my portfolio. Sometimes we’ll shoot more, and sometimes less… but 14 shots is a nice average for a short photography trip.

Punch Bowl Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (OR), USA

So how can I produce a few good images per day on a consistent basis?  It comes down to research and field techniques that allow us to shoot in a variety of different light conditions. Before we go out, we research weather patterns, tides, seasonal colors, phases of the moon, climate, flora, fauna, and locations. We often contact local photographers and pick their brains about the local landscapes. Based upon this research, we try to choose the locations that will allow us to maximize the probability of getting a good photograph at the time we plan to travel to the location. When we arrive at the location, our plans will always be fluid. They will change based upon weather patterns as necessary.

How much time do you devote to research and field techniques vs developing your technical and processing skills? Does the time spent researching locations help you make the most of your time on location?

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Colorado, USA

Q and A – Do I like my Graphics Tablet?

Varina Patel —  January 22, 2013

When people see me working, they invariably ask if I like my Wacom Graphics Tablet. The answer is HECK, YES! I absolutely love my tablet.

I’ve been using Intuos tablets since 2004. So, you can imagine the smile on my face when Wacom contacted us recently and invited us to join them in creating content for their Insivity.com website. They sent each of us a shiny, new Intuos5 – which is doing it’s job very nicely right now.

My Wacom tablet and stylus give me incredible control in Photoshop. I can make fine adjustments with great precision. Have you ever tried to draw a complicated selection with the mouse? Even making a smooth circle is difficult with such a clunky tool. With the stylus, I can draw that selection… and just about anything else… with ease.

The Wacom tablet is pressure sensitive. So I can change the weight or the brush size just by changing the pressure on my tablet. It works the way you’d use a pencil or a paint brush, so it’s intuitive and easy to get used to. I can get incredibly smooth lines, and perfect accuracy.

Learning to use a tablet isn’t as difficult as you think. You’ll need to learn how to click and drag, left and right click, and select… but that’s all pretty straightforward once you know how to do it. Getting used to it can be a little awkward – but in a day or two, you’ll find yourself wondering why you didn’t switch to a tablet sooner. There are tons of tutorials available online too – on the Wacom site, on Insivity.com, and on YouTube.

I guess the thing to understand is that you can do anything with a stylus that you could do with a mouse – and SO much more.

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Crystal Creek, Colorado (CO), USA

Can a “Photoshopped” image match reality?

Jay Patel —  November 26, 2012

What is a SOOC photo? SOOC stands for “Straight Out Of the Camera”. And those who use the term are generally looking for a pat on the back. Their photography is clearly superior because they “got it right” in the camera. No “manipulation”. No post-processing. Just a true representation of the scene in all its glory. When a photographer talks about their SOOC photos, they are often not-very-subtly implying that those who use processing software are cheating and that their photos are fakes. And that’s all well and good for them. I think I’ll stick to my post-processing, thank you very much. ;)

While I enjoy the challenge of “getting it right in the camera”, the fact is that even the most advanced cameras can’t always handle the broad dynamic range of light in nature. With the help of Photoshop, I am often able to create a photo that is much closer to reality than SOOC photos.

Consider the above image. I took this photograph of Lizard Lake in Colorado on a partly cloudy day. There’s no bright glaring sunlight here. The range of light isn’t very extreme. At first glance, the lighting, the colors, and the exposure look pretty well balanced. You might think that under such conditions, the photograph could be easily captured with a point-n-shoot or even a mobile phone camera in automatic mode. And a nice DSLR should be able to handle that range of light easily, right?

Well. No. This is not an SOOC image. In fact, I created this photo by blending three separate exposures using our iHDR workflow to maintain a natural look.

Here are the three bracketed exposures – SOOC using default settings. Notice that none of the individual exposures looks better than the processed image. And none of these SOOC shots represent reality as closely as the manually blended image. It is true that photographers can get pretty artistic with Photoshop and HDR technology – but in many cases, processing software also lets us bring our photographs much closer to reality than those SOOC photos.

There are – of course – LOTS of other good reasons to take the time to process your photos. This is just one of them!

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Transient Light, Glacier National Park, MT

How much time do you spend in Photoshop?

Jay Patel —  November 12, 2012

For us, the answer is different for every photograph. Some photos require just a moment or two in Photoshop, while others requires more than 30 minutes. On average, I spend between 5 and 15 minutes per image in Photoshop. Here is a typical Photoshop workflow for me.

This is an image from Glacier National Park in Montana. It’s one of my early photographs produced using a GND filter and my old Canon D30 (Canon’s first 3mp DSLR). I always do what I can to get it right in-camera, but the dynamic range of the scene was too great for my camera to handle.

This image showcases two types of light. On the right side of the image, you can see predawn magenta light. This is the subtle reflected light that touches the mountains before the sun comes over the horizon. The light falling on the clouds in the upper left is direct light from the sun, which is very low on the horizon. This light is far more intense than the soft, predawn light on the right side. So even with my GND filter, the top left of the image was over exposed.

To process this image, I started with the Basic tab in Adobe Camera RAW (as shown above – click for a larger view). I chose white balance and exposure settings that produced the most accurate colors for the predawn light. (2 minutes)  As expected, the area that was lit by direct sunlight (the area marked in red) was too bright. I felt that most of the image was correctly processed with just a few simple adjustments to white balance, exposure, and contrast. In almost all my images, I use a colors saturation of 10% or less.

The next step was to open the image in Photoshop and to restore the highlights, bring out the shadow details, and make few minor targeted adjustments. To restores the highlight, I processed this RAW image again, and manually blended the two versions using our iHDR workflow. (6 minutes)  Then, I used layers and masks in Photoshop to make targeted adjustments. I used a Wacom Intuos tablet for drawing selections for masks – the stylus lets me be incredibly precise so I can create perfect masks really quickly. (5 minutes) My total time spend in Photoshop (including Adobe Camera RAW) for this particular image was about 13 minutes.

How much time do you spend in Photoshop? Feel free to share your workflow.

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Sol Duc Falls, Olympic National Park, WA

Mediocre Skills or Being Artistic?

Jay Patel —  November 5, 2012

A while ago, I posted these two images on one of the social networks as an example of how my photography skills have evolved over time.

From a technical perspective, there are many flaws in the second photo. Some of the more obvious – mediocre composition, blown highlights, and lacking shadow details. The overall lighting for the photograph is too harsh. My goal was to capture the beauty of the place, but instead I came away with an image that is almost black and white.  Still, more than one viewer commented that the image was a “moody” and “artistic” representation of the scene.

My first reaction was to dismiss those comments. Maybe they were posted by people who lacked the skills required to produce the photograph I really wanted. But on further reflection, I realized that not all great artists rely on technical perfection to create an impact. Sometimes, artwork lacks “technical correctness”, but still produces a strong emotional impact.

So I found myself contemplating this question: Do photographers try to disguise their mediocre photography skills as “artistic”?

For me, the question comes down to intent. If my intent was to capture the color, light, and details I saw in the forest, then my image is less than mediocre. On the other hand, if my intent was to capture an artistic impression of the forest, then maybe you’d say I succeeded in doing so.

Of course, in this case, my intent was to capture the falls the way I did in the first image (a few years later). Clean colors, rich details, and smooth water. I didn’t know how to do that the first time I photographed these falls. So rather than categorizing my earlier attempt as a failure – I think of it as an opportunity to learn… and learn I did. Now that I know how to capture a scene like this one more effectively, I have so many more options!

Do you evaluate yourself by your artistic ability or by your technical skills?

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Once in a Lifetime

Is it ok to “Manipulate” your Photos?

Varina Patel —  October 4, 2012

Long Shutter Speed creates surreal effect, and a color enhancement in Photoshop mimics Velvia film.

In the days of film photography, photographers manipulated their images in the darkroom. Ansel Adams himself was very accomplished in the darkroom – and he wasn’t afraid to stretch the boundaries of possibility. I think we take ourselves entirely too seriously if we aren’t willing to let photography be the art form that it is. Of course, there are limits to what I believe is acceptable. First and foremost – I believe in honesty. If I adjusted an image in Photoshop, I believe it’s important to be honest about the changes I’ve made. And if I am presenting an image for documentary purposes – newspapers etc – then I need to make sure my photograph is true to the reality of the original scene. That said, as far as I’m concerned… there are no limits to what is acceptable when it comes to your art work.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that a JPG image directly from your camera is also a manipulation… it’s just manipulated according to the settings you select in-camera, and the algorithms that the software developers choose.

Film was very different… there were no built-in, digital algorithms. No JPG or RAW or PSD… and yet, photographers used colored filters to produce effects that are similar to what we can achieve in PS. They dodged and burned and cropped and rotated. They chose Velvia film to produce saturated colors. They used circular polarizers to enhance colors and reduce reflections.

A circular polarizer filter helped remove distracting reflections from the wet surface of the rock. A wide-angle lens makes the rock appear large and adds depth to the image.

They used kaleidoscopic lenses to create bizarre manipulations, and fish-eye lenses to create extreme distortion, and wide-angle lenses to mess with perspective, and long lenses to get close to faraway objects, and macro lenses to make little things look big. They created double exposures.

Double Exposure created in Photoshop from two images taken within minutes of one another.

They used soft focus, or a long exposure, or a narrow depth of field to change the look of the scene they were photographing.

A narrow depth of field eliminates distracting details from the background.

And they even used masks – carefully cut from dark paper, or even created with the help of a microscope – to build images that were not so different from what we can do with Photoshop today. If photography is art – then who decides what is right or wrong? The artist, of course!

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